Trust, Tribalism, and a Multi-Chain Future
Trust. It’s at the core of everything that we do as a species. Our ability to depend on something future or contingent is a foundational aspect of human society. With it, we can establish long-lasting, collaborative relationships and build towards a better future, and without it, civil society breaks down. But we don’t trust everyone, and nor should we, so how does society function? If you consider your day-to-day life and think about your interactions with people, technologies, and services, there will be one common theme throughout. If you do not personally know the person you interact with, a middle man will be present. But what if we didn’t need a middle-man? What would those interactions look like?
Understanding the Past
To understand what the future could look like, we must first understand the past. For much of human history, communication and relationships were consistent: centralized and face-to-face. The phone changed this, and the mobile phone accelerated that change, bringing the first instances of decentralization.
The next paradigm shift came about shortly after the launch of the internet. Web 1.0 allowed users to share data and collaborate remotely on centrally hosted projects. As the internet evolved, Web 2.0 technologies encouraged a new level of collaboration and sharing amongst users decentralized. These technologies shifted the value production from firms to consumers and gave rise to new business models centered around the hosting of user data.
The cost of hosting was prohibitively expensive for the individual, so this led to the majority of content being hosted on third-party servers. Analysis of this data for targeted advertising and marketing proved incredibly lucrative and birthed the Web 2.0 giants, such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. These entities grew into the behemoths we know today by leveraging the value extracted from user data hosted on their cloud servers.
The Problems with Web2
Web2 platforms exist in a silo, each with its self-contained ecosystem. This trend is nearly universal across industries and disciplines. Engage with Apple products, for example, and you’re trapped in a user experience that has been chosen for you because Apple knows best. Choose an Xbox over a Playstation, or vice versa, and you won’t be able to play with your friends who chose the rival platform.
That is not to say that there are no advantages to this approach. User experience can be maintained at a consistent level. The interoperability of products within a given ecosystem can be guaranteed. But this all happens at the expense of a loss of agency. In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that through intrusive advertising, the spread of fake news, and the loss of user data through targeted hacks, Web 2.0 technologies no longer serve the end-user. As such, is this tradeoff still a good thing?
Alternatives
The answer to this question is almost universally no, but there hasn’t been a viable alternative until now. With the rise of blockchain technology, that is changing. Users from all sectors and industries are reimagining how their communities, groups, and initiatives are structured.
Gamers can earn a living doing what they love through Play-to-Earn gaming. Artists can connect with their fanbase in a way that removes snobbery from art. Investors can generate returns and engage with tools usually reserved for elite finance professionals. Communities can self-organize and raise funds around ideas and initiatives that would otherwise be ignored.
A fundamentally new way of doing things at all levels in online society is being born. With this birth, there are myriad opportunities to create something new, more open, and radically inclusive. The future can unlock human creativity and collaboration in ways that have never before been seen, yet despite this, we are witnessing a potentially worrying trend emerge.
Tribalism and the Future
Tribalism is as much a part of the human experience as trust. We have formed groups around shared interests for as long as we have been, with the characteristics of those groups being as varied as the human experience itself. There is nothing terrible about this, and the power of community is one of the most valuable features of Web3. The problems arise, however, with how those tribes are being formed.
Groups are formed around shared experiences, beliefs, and values. With Web2, they are also limited by the platform upon which that formation took place. The limiting of interoperability between Web2 platforms artificially limited the amount of organic growth that could take place. Gaming is an excellent example of this. Exclusivity of games to specific platforms limited the development of the communities that formed around those games on the one hand and forced players to choose an allegiance to whichever console they owned.
With Web3, though this kind of exclusivity is no longer necessary from either a user experience or infrastructure capability standpoint, it is still happening. This is neither good nor bad. It just is. Gamers and developers alike have had the forced-choice shifted from which console to which chain. From a marketing and user adoption standpoint, this approach is useful. Yet it is also problematic as there is a real risk that instead of embracing an exciting future of unprecedented collaboration and positivity, we merely replicate existing systems and silos on-chain, limiting ourselves before things even begin.
How do we avoid this?
Cross-chain interoperability.
By embracing multichain, tribalism is no longer a zero-sum game. A single chain approach to community building focuses on increasing the size of the slice of the pie a project has. A multichain approach increases the size of the pie itself, and with that, significantly more value is delivered to the end-user. The user is free to shape their experience entirely based upon their desires and needs and is limited only by their sense of possibility.
A future that is entirely unfettered by the limitations that past practices have imposed is possible with Web3. This is precisely the future that GuildFi is striving to bring about. By focusing on delivering maximum value to gamers, or any other type of user, we have the opportunity to create something truly extraordinary. Next week’s article will explore how this is already being accomplished and how this process can be accelerated.
